Based upon data from the main European countries, this chart compares portable hardware sales this year with last year. Sony launched the new PSP in the 36th week of this year. PSP sales actually increased at that time, but it did not appear to have any significant impact upon DS sales. While DS shows a small decrease in sales in the 36th to 38th weeks, this must be attributable to the so-called seasonality issue, as the same decrease occurred in the same period a year ago, too, as the light pink bar indicates. All in all, DS has been selling independently, regardless of the model changes by other companies.

Let’s compare the sales rates of the three hardware platforms in the U.S. market.

Wii sees a decline in February, but this was because of decreased shipments due to decreased production during the Chinese new-year holidays. With this exception, Wii has been showing constant sales, irrelevant to the so-called the seasonality factor. In the United States, the demand for Wii has been constantly greater than supply. That must be the reason why the PS3 price cut in July, the Xbox360 price cut in August and the launch of Halo3 had virtually no influence on the sales of Wii. The sales volume of Wii was determined rather by its availability on store shelves.

The situation for home console hardware is similar in Europe. As the PS3 price cut was made only two weeks ago, I wanted to show you the most recent data we have. So, we have gathered data through last week in the UK, France and Germany, where independent research companies are quick to gather sell-through results.

We can see some decreases in Wii sales in the 39th and 40th weeks, but this was due to stock shortages in the UK at that time. Since stocks were replenished from the 41st week, the sales pace has also recovered quickly. When software was bundled with PS3, when the Xbox360 price was marked down, when new upper-grade hardware was launched, or when the PS3 price was cut, we could see some sales volume changes for these other platforms. However, they have hardly affected Wii sales. The decision we have made, to make DS and Wii uniquely different from any other devices appears to have helped create unique and original markets which are hardly affected by changes in other hardware configurations.

By taking all this and more into consideration, we announced revisions to our full-year financial forecasts yesterday.

We are revising estimated unit shipments of Nintendo DS hardware for the full fiscal year from 26million to 28million. DS software, from 140million to 165million. Wii hardware from 16.5million to 17.5million. And Wii software from 72million to 97million units.

Now that more hardware and software sales are expected, we are revising the sales forecast to 1.550trillion yen and the operational profit to 420billion yen. With the revised foreign currency exchange rates of 115yen per U.S. dollar and 160yen per euro, we are now expecting our recurring profit to become 460billion yen, and the net profit, 275billion yen.

The company has been setting two criteria to decide the annual dividend: the larger between making 33% of consolidated operational profit the dividend source, or basing it upon a 50% dividend payout ratio. We have this policy so that the dividend amount can still reflect our actual operational results even when the yen has become stronger and a substantial amount of foreign currency revaluation loss is incurred.

After revising our financial forecasts, we are now expecting the annual dividend to look like this.

At the Nintendo Conference 2007 that we held on October 10, I said that, as the 3rd step for gaming population expansion….